Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern

"A brilliant demonstration of how speech genres can shape history, Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern traces the emergence of political oratory in South India, calling new publics into being and driving the rise of the Tamil modern. Bernard Bate's new book is a foundational, richly documented contribution to the study of comparative modernities, South Asian history, and political anthropology, securing his legacy as a worthy heir to Weber and Durkheim in the elucidation of modern social and political formations."—Richard Bauman, Indiana University, Bloomington "This book—assembled by a remarkable group of his colleagues—is a tribute to Bate's monumental effort to place Tamil oratory in its civilizational, genealogical, and comparative context. Bate's argument about Protestant sermonizing as the key to the birth of the modern political subject in Tamil country is a major breakthrough in the study of the linkage of modern politics to poetics and religious oratory."—Arjun Appadurai, New York University "Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern succeeds as the work of an academic community that is motivated by the desire to see that their friend and colleague's research receives the academic reception they believe is its due. It also stands as a monument to the scholarship of an original and gifted anthropologist... It is now for other scholars to take up the trail that Bate has blazed."—L. Michael Ratnapalan, Situations